The Newcomer Website has details on this role-playing game in the works for the Commodore 64, which becomes a little less perplexing when it becomes clear that this game has been in development for 20 years now (which raises its own set of perplexing questions, but it's best to stay on track at this point). The game is apparently near release, as an update from November 1 has word they are gearing up to create a gold master. There are articles on the history of the project on Play This Thing and GMZ. Thanks Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Oh man, Bruce Lee, Bump n Jump, Spy Hunter, Beachead I and II, Epyx's Destroyer (best sim game I thought at the time), Silent Service, Impossible Mission (never could figure out how to beat it), Alien, Super Bowl Sunday, and so many more. The C64 was awesome back then!

Yeah, like coldcut said that would load the first file. My disks usually had more than one game (even though I only listed one in my post) so I had to select which one to load by spelling out the first few characters. Just habit I put that in there.

I gave away my working C64, 1541 disk drive and monitor years ago to a nostalgic buddy of mine, along with all my disks. Thank Zeus for emulators! Man, what games didn't I play? The Games series by Epyx (Summer, Summer II, Winter, World, CA...), all the old Accoldade titles (Test Drive, Killed Until Dead, etc), Archon, Beachhead II, Nemesis the Warlock, Caveman Ughlympics, Farmer's Daughter, Ballblazer, Karateka, I could really just go on and on listing games....

Fun fact: Did you guys know that the agonising load times on the C64 were the result of an engineering flaw? The engineers originally designed the drive with a bunch of redundant circuit pathways for debugging. They marked them as being removed from the paper schematic they sent to the Japanese factory (yep, they used paper schematics then) but someone at the factory misread the plans and re-added the redundant pathways. By the time the problem was found, the drives were already well into production and since Commodore was in poor financial shape prior to the C64 release, they couldn't afford to fix it and had to leave them that way. Since there was no way to engineer them out without breaking compatibility, they became a permanent part of the lineup.

Yep, all those hours of our lives spent waiting for things to load didn't have to be. That said, I had an Atari 130XE growing up that loaded super fast but I still wanted a C64.

LOAD "$",8 loads the directory of the discLOAD "*",8,1 loads the first file found on the disc

Oh, the good old times... I remember playing Pool of Radiance on C64, and because it had no disc acceleration I had to wait ~ 5 minutes until a fight was loaded (which applied to EVERY fight ... the game was daaaamn long because of that).

Ohhh, and I remember drawing the levels, dungeons onto checkered (correct?) paper and later on I wrote a C64 program which allowed me to draw and save these with the C64 line drawing symbols ... oh boy, cool times indeed

At what point - or with which historical piece of technology - does emulation and backward gaming become too painful?Excuse me while I just go outside for some firewood, which I shall acquire by gnawing down a tree with my teeth.

Gah, I can't imagine all the disk swapping (EDIT) wow, 11 single sided disks will be needed for that game. I remember playing Bard's Tale and Ultima4 on the C64 and swapping in 3-4 floppies throughout the games. It's 2010, can you even buy 5.25" floppies for the C64